Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

The cigarette was trembling between Uncle Joe's fingers. He gave Joseph a round-eyed look, and Joseph nodded. Only an extremely antisocial, possibly even sociopathic, person would live in a death hogan. You didn't have to believe the superstitions to be frightened of someone who would commit such a grave offense against social norms.

Uncle Joe fell silent, staring at the sandstone outcrop. From here, its profile resembled a huge dead iguana, angling up from the rocky desert floor.

The old man was shaking his head regretfully. "I should have known better. Because on the way in, before I got to the hogan, I'd seen a couple of dead animals. Dead coyote. Dead crow. Dead rabbit. That's how a Skinwalker moves around. This one was too old to get around in his human body, but he could still use theirs. The Skinwalker projects his chindi into the animal, gets all the animal's powers-see in the dark, walk with no sound, smell people out, fly. When he's done using it, he goes back to his own body and the animal body dies. That's what those animals were. What he'd cast off."

The silence pressed around them again. Joseph felt unaccountably exposed out here, under the naked sky, the truck sitting in the middle of the track in the certain knowledge no one would come by.

"Maybe we should get going, Uncle Joe. What is it, another ten miles or so, right?"

"But at the time I just thought, okay, whoever lives up here was shooting pests or something. Then up at the hogan, I'm thinking, I don't know, maybe somebody died here just yesterday, the family's got another hogan, maybe back beyond the sheds and the little cliff, out of view. I'm still hoping I can borrow a horse. So I head back to the sheds, I'm thinking maybe somebody's working over there and doesn't hear me yet. And when I get over there, I see there's a sort of a cave in the ledge, the opening's about ten feet wide, half hidden behind a shed and a dead pinon tree. I looked into that cave."

Even resting on his knee, Uncle Joe's cigarette hand was shaking so hard the ash scattered. He paused for so long that Joseph thought he wouldn't go on, and he realized suddenly what a huge effort it required for Uncle Joe to tell this.

At last the rasping voice continued, quavering yet determined: "I ducked my head to look inside. Wasn't really a cave, more of an undercut-maybe only ten feet deep. The back wall sloped up to meet the ceiling, real rough, just broken rock. It took my eyes a second to adapt to the darkness under there, but the first thing I see is clumps of dark shapes up where the wall meets the ceiling. Took me a second to see it's bats, maybe fifty, a hundred of them. Then I see that part of the rock wall isn't a rock wall, it's a naked dead man, hanging upside down like the bats. He's as dried up as a mummy, just skin over bones, he's the same color as the rocks, he's streaked with guano same as the wall. He's got his ankles hooked into a loop of rope pegged in up near the ceiling, hands folded across his chest."

"What the hell-"

' 'And just when I realize what I'm looking at, the fingers of his hands start to spread! Then his eyes open, he looks straight at me and bends at the waist so he sits partway up, sticking out from the wall. He spreads his arms wide, he's still being a bat. All this took maybe three seconds total elapsed time since I first looked in there. My heart stopped dead. I had actual, medical cardiac arrest. And then I went running down that track. I ran all the way back to where we are now and maybe two miles back toward White Rock."

Joseph felt sick. From Uncle Joe's trembling voice, the quiver of his jaw, it was clear that the old man was telling it factually. Some senile old hermit, gone crazy, maybe nearing death, morbid with Alzheimer's, lost in sick fantasies, violating taboos. No one to supervise him, bring him back home to his humanity.

"I wish I'd never looked into that cave," Uncle Joe said, voice hollow with regret. "I wish I'd never seen that. It was bad enough when I thought he was a dead man, a mummy like over in Canyon del Muerte. But what I felt when those fingers began to spread… I don't like to think fear can be that strong."

"Whatever happened to him?"

Uncle Joe swiveled his face toward Joseph's, looking very old, wrinkles swarming his eyes and brow like some fantastic design of ornamental scars.

"Not long after, they killed him. People from around here got together. Six men went up, six good men. Old Hastiin Keeday, the grandfather we're going to see, he was one of them. Killed the Wolf, then burned him and the hogan and everything up there. Nothing left, I hear. No trace."

A horrible thought occurred to Joseph. "Because you told them-"

"No. It had been building up for a long time, people were scared, something had to be done. I never told anyone what I'd seen, ever. Not even my wife. I never wanted to say it out loud. You are the very first person, Joseph."

That was true, too, Joseph knew, and he felt oddly honored to know his uncle had made such an effort for him. From Uncle Joe's discomfort, he knew this was not just another argument for the old man's late-gained traditionalist worldview. It was an act of deep humility and courage. And, touchingly, affection.

"Why did you tell me, Uncle?"

"Yeah, I'm trying to figure that out. Now I'm so shook up I lost what I was going to say." Uncle Joe looked down at his cigarette, which had burned to the knuckles of his shaking hand and had to be searing him. He flicked it down, ground it out, and stared at his own footprint for a moment.

"After that, I changed. The family put on a Sing for me, and that helped. Mainly, what changed me was I had to think about what it meant to be a man like him, how he got that way. Once, he was probably like anyone else. Then he changed, maybe bit by bit, or maybe all at once, who knows, maybe what's happening to Tommy Keeday happened to him and that's what he became. I don't know. Before that, I was a little fast and loose-in the army, in school. I could talk people into anything, I didn't mind taking their money in ways that weren't so good. And women-that kind of thing. But for years after that, every time I was alone, I saw that… thing… sitting up off the rocks. It came together in my mind with some bad stuff I'd seen in Korea, too, made me realize that whatever was wrong with that Wolf came from something that's inside every man. Even me. And I decided I didn't want to become anything like that. I couldn't change what I'd seen, but what I would be-that much I could control, I could decide."

Uncle Joe had begun drifting back toward the truck, Joseph tagging just behind. "So I guess I thought you should probably think about that. Before we talk to the Keedays. When you're dealing with this boy's problem and the business with Julieta. Today we're coming clean about Julieta's baby, I'll help you however I can. But a thing like this, what you're going to be dealing with, it's going to be very hard. But what you do with it-that you should think about. How you let it change you. How you might choose."

Back in the cab, Uncle Joe didn't start up the truck right away. He sat, slumped with weariness, gazing at the dead-iguana ledge, as if lost in memory. It occurred to Joseph that he hadn't seen his uncle take a drink today, and that he couldn't recall any other time he'd seen him without a bottle close by. He had to be feeling the hard hand of his addiction on him by now. It reinforced his sense that the old man was doing something very heroic for him today.

At last Uncle Joe turned the key and the truck's big engine made a startling roar in the silence.

"Tell you one thing, though," Uncle Joe said finally. He shook his head, as if astonished and grateful for at least one certainty in life. "That Willys was one good little jeep. That was the only time it ever died on me. Only time it ever let me down, and I worked that bastard like a mule."